Counter-insurgency in Rhodesia

1. What they did

This book is a history and analysis of the strategy the Rhodesian Security Forces used against the insurgent armies during the war that ended with Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. It grew out of the author’s 1981 Master’s dissertation in Strategic Studies at the University of South Africa. He drew on the Africa Research Bulletin, newspaper files, classified documents from former Security Force members, and many in-depth interviews in South Africa and Zimbabwe, which he used to cross-check details of operations and methods.

The file here holds only the opening of the book: the contents, list of abbreviations, Introduction and the first 21 pages of Chapter 1, a brief history of the war. The full book goes on to chapters on command and control, protected villages, border minefields, pseudo operations and the Selous Scouts, psychological operations, external raids, auxiliary forces and intelligence.

2. What they found

The early years (1960s)

• The first insurgent incursions came from Zambia across the sparsely populated Zambezi River valley, in fairly large groups that the Security Forces found easily. The counter-measures were “largely track and kill type operations”.
• In 1967 a force of 90 insurgents entered near Victoria Falls; 47 were killed within three weeks and more than 20 captured.
• Early in 1968 a group of 123 stayed undetected for three months and set up six base camps about 30 km apart, until a game ranger reported them.

A new kind of war (from 1972)

• The Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) entered the north-east through Mozambique’s Tete province. Rugged mountains and dense vegetation, especially in the rainy season, hindered observation.
• ZANLA first won the support of local people. Within weeks, information from the population dried up. A Security Force commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Reid-Daly, wrote that the insurgents no longer hid in remote bush camps where they “could eventually be tracked down”, nor in villages where local people would report them: “This time there was nothing. No tracks … no information.”

Operation Hurricane

• The plan was to channel insurgents into areas cleared of people (“no-go” areas), where the Security Forces “could easily track and eliminate” them before they reached populated areas.
• Rural people were moved into protected villages under strict curfews, to cut their link with the insurgents. Some 750,000 people were eventually resettled in more than 200 protected villages. In one 1974 operation, all 46,960 people of Chiweshe Tribal Trust Land were moved into 21 protected villages within six weeks.
• A 1978 poster set curfews for people and for cattle, oxen, goats and sheep, and ordered all dogs tied up day and night.
• A border minefield, begun in 1974, was meant to stop all cross-border movement, but lack of people and money meant it could not be watched, patrolled or even maintained.
• Between December 1972 and late 1974, 468 insurgents and 48 Security Force members were killed.

3. What they concluded

• The Rhodesian authorities were lulled into a false sense of security by their success in the 1960s, and believed military action alone would defeat the insurgency.
• Once the insurgents won local support, the government’s harsh and punitive measures (collective punishment, curfews, forced resettlement) were likely to turn rural people against it. The protected village scheme was inconsistently carried out and eventually failed.
• The border minefields showed the lack of a coherent national strategy.
• The author’s overall verdict on the war is given in the book’s later chapters, which are not in this file.

4. How tracking was or was not used

The excerpt does not describe tracking methods. It mentions tracking as a military tool: the “track and kill” operations of the 1960s, the plan to track and eliminate insurgents in depopulated areas, and the commander’s remark that insurgents hiding among local people left “no tracks”. Chapter 5 of the full book (not in this file) covers pseudo operations and the Selous Scouts.

5. Tracker or observer certification

Not reported. The excerpt does not say who did the tracking.